The (withering) right to choose

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You think Roe v. Wade is a bulwark protecting women's right to reproductive choice? Think again.

See South Dakota, where new legislation has, this writer argues, effectively outlawed abortion. It's not just the 72-hour waiting period that makes it all but impossible for the state's periodic abortion provider to fly in to see women. It's a much more devious element of the law. Women must also be "counseled" by anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy" operations before they may end a pregnancy. What a wrinkle:

...not a single crisis pregnancy center has agreed to counsel patients seeking abortion so that those patients can fill their requirements to get their abortions. Not even the centers that lobbied to get the requirement pushed through. Without centers willing to say they saw the patients seeking abortion, patients could be caught in a red tape nightmare that makes getting abortions impossible.

It’s always possible that this is a paperwork oversight, but experience tells us that anti-choicers don’t play by the normal ethical rules of fair play (which comes with the territory when you’re organized around the immoral desire to force unwilling women to bear children), so we have to consider the alternative, that this was the plan all along. At the end of the day, the “counseling” requirement is using bureaucratic nonsense to create a situation where women who want abortions have to get consent from people who think that every woman should be forced to have as many children as possible, whether she likes it or not. Of course they’re going to refuse to give that consent. Through a paperwork shuffle, the state of South Dakota has given the power to control abortion access to anti-choicers, and their choice—-surprise, surprise—-is a ban.

You can be sure the anti-choice crowd in Arkansas are licking their chops to replicate this denial of women's rights here.